Quotes About Statistics

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

We humans scorn what is not concrete. We are more easily swayed by a crying baby than by thousands of people dying elsewhere that do not make it into our dining room. The one case is a tragedy, the other a statistic.

whatever they are guessing has about a 2 percent chance to fall outside their range.

getting a lot of "timely" statistics are capable of overreacting and mistaking noise for information—

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal);

Take a population of 10 people, 9 having a net worth of $ 30,000 and 1 having a net worth of $ 1,000. The average net worth is $ 27,100 and 9 out of 10 people will have above average wealth.

A random series will always present some detectable pattern. I

the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns. Ten days in fifty years. Meanwhile, we are mired in chitchat.

Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers;

the concept of median used in medical research does not characterize a probability distribution.

The beast in this book is not just the bell curve and the self-deceiving statistician, nor the Platonified scholar who needs theories to fool himself with. It is the drive to "focus" on what makes sense to us. Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.

The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models

When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total.

There is actually a law in statistics called the law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country.

And numerical prediction leads people to take more risks.

Given that the window used for the calculation of patient survival is five years

A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Likewise, the risk of a Black Swan is invisible.

There is a category of people, generally finance academics, who, instead of fitting their actions to their brains, fit their brains to their actions. These people go back and unwittingly cheat with the statistics to justify their actions. In my business, they fool themselves with statistical arguments to justify their option selling.

but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

Como se supone que dijo Stalin (que algo sabía sobre la mortalidad): «Una muerte es una tragedia; un millón de muertes, una estadística». La estadística permanece callada en nuestro interior.

So when I presented to what was until then the most hostile crowd in the world, members of the American Statistical Association, a map of the four quadrants, and told them: your knowledge works beautifully in these three quadrants, but beware of the fourth one, as this is where the Black Swans breed, I received instant approval, support, offers of permanent friendship, refreshments (Diet Coke), invitations to come present at their sessions, even hugs.

The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider

that professionals are significantly influenced by numbers that they know to be irrelevant to their decision